Pythagoras was an ancient Greek mathematician and
philosopher who was one of the most influential men in all of
history. Even though he was a mathematician, his contributions
help all sorts of fields of study, including math, science, music
and astronomy. Most of his contributions, and those of his
followers, the Pythagoreans, are known and used throughout the
world. Almost everyone knows his theorem that the sum of the
squares of the lengths of the two shorter sides of a right
triangle is equal to the square of the length hypotenuse.

Pythagoras was born on the Greek Island of
Samos. He traveled around the known world visiting Babylonia and
Egypt along with seeing other parts of Greece. Early on in his
life several other philosophers, such as Anaximander majorly
influenced him. Pythagoras was a patron of the ancient Greek
Olympic games, even though he criticized them. He died at some
point around the turn of the century in Metapontion.

He started a religious and philosophical
order known as the Pythagoreans and most of his work was
completed between himself and his followers. His society was
founded in Croton, in southern Italy.

The society was made up of two groups, the
pupils and the learned, or teachers. These people set up the
world's first organized schools.

They were a very strict order and had many
restrictions, such as no meat or beans, and the new members
couldn't even speak until they had listened to the teaching of
their master for 5 years.

Even after the first 5 years the pupil's
work was too be left anonymous, the discoveries made were either
credited to the master or to the school itself.

The Pythagoreans believed that everything
in the universe revolved around mathematics, such as music and
the magicks. Every number had a soul and a specific meaning and
value to the universe.

We here at the WM Times traveled across the
globe and back in time to interview the famous Pythagoras and
find out about some of his discoveries and theorems.

WM Times: So Pythagoras you made many
contributions to geometry, can you tell us a few of them?

Pythagoras: Sure. You of course know of my
a2+b2 = c2, but I created this method at first just to prove that
a triangle was a right triangle. I also discovered a formula to
find out how many degrees there are in a polygon. I came up with
(n-2)180°= the number of degrees in a polygon, where n
represents the number of sides in the polygon. For example, a
triangle has three sides, 3-2=1, 1x180=180, which is the total
sum of all the inner angles of a triangle. Along with that I
found out that the sum of all the outer angles of a polygon is
always equal to three hundred sixty degrees. This is true for
every single polygon, regardless of the number of the sides.

WM T: That's impressive, and you came up
with all of this by yourself?

P: Not entirely, my followers, the
Pythagoreans, contributed some of my work.

WM T: I've heard rumors that you didn't
come up with the a2+b2 = c2 theorem at all, that while you spent
a brief period in Babylonia, you stole the idea, an idea found on
a stone tablet from over one thousand years before your time.

P: That is ridiculous, maybe these people
thought it up first, but it was my people and I who prove it to
be true.

WM T: Your discoveries and ideas were not
limited to just math, what else did you come up with?

P: Well. I did a lot of work with
proportions in other fields. I looked at and showed the
difference in pitch in ratio to the length of string plucked. It
was not as I expected. I found out that half way along the string
is not half the pitch. I also looked to the stars and saw that
the further away a planet is from where it orbited the longer it
would take to go around the sun. Oh yes and you told me a few
minutes ago that I was quite incorrect in my teachings about the
Earth being in the center of the universe.

WM T: Sticking to your errors, did you ever
discover anything that contradicted one of you previous ideas?

P: Of course I did. I believed that every
single number was rational. Then in my work with right triangles,
I found irrational numbers and proved myself wrong.

WM T: One final question, why? Why all the
philosophy and mathematical discovery?

P: I did it because I am not content with
accepting things as they are. I need explanations and reasons.
Through this, I discovered a lot of different things, many being
very useful.